Pope spoke his mind - and heart

09:47 AM CDT on
Saturday, October 14, 2006

By DAVID GIBSON / Special Contributor to The
Dallas Morning News

Pope Benedict XVI has had a bad few weeks, really the first of his relatively
young and surprisingly uncontroversial pontificate.

The fury in Muslim quarters in response to his academic lecture on religion
and violence continues to spread. He has thrice been compelled to publicly
explain – "apologize" is too strong a word – that he didn't mean to insult
Islam, that he regrets the "reaction" his words caused, and that he respects
Muslims.

Meanwhile, many Catholics chose to ignore the pope's explanations and argued
that the Islamic reactions to the initial remarks showed Benedict was right in
the first place – Islam is inherently violent.

The pope's original comments were puzzling, in that they were from an obscure
source that was used as an anecdote to introduce a characteristically erudite
lecture on faith and reason delivered at the University of Regensburg in
Bavaria, where he once taught theology.

He began by citing a dialogue between a Persian scholar and a 14th-century
Christian emperor of Byzantium. The two were discussing the concept of violence
in Islam. "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will
find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword
the faith he preached," Benedict quoted the Christian emperor as saying.

The pontiff went on to critique the West and secularism and "liberal"
Christians just as sharply. But none of these other groups burned him in effigy.

The Muslim furor, or at least resentment and suspicion of the pope, seem
likely to endure and may threaten Benedict's visit next month to Turkey.

But even as the focus remains on the indefensible reaction by many Muslims,
other crucial questions are being overlooked, chief among them: Why did the pope
make such statements in the first place?

If Benedict's words were just poorly chosen, one might say that perhaps he is
indeed a different man as pope than he was as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the
Panzerkardinal who was the Vatican's longtime doctrinal watchdog before he
became pope in April 2005.

When it comes to Pope Benedict, however, there are no coincidences. While he
surely did not intend to spark such a terrible response, when viewed in the
context of his career and personality, this episode begins to look like a
natural extension of his past record rather than the diplomatic faux pas of a
freshman pope.

Long before he was elected pope, Cardinal Ratzinger made it crystal clear
that he took a much more critical view of Islam than did Pope John Paul II.
Whereas John Paul stressed points of commonality between the Catholic Church and
Islam – he was the first pope to visit a mosque – Cardinal Ratzinger was more
skeptical. He forcefully voiced doubts about Islam's capacity for
self-examination and reform. In 2004 he opined that Turkey could never be part
of the European Union because its Muslim identity placed it "in permanent
contrast" to Europe's Christian culture.

His willingness to challenge Islam may in fact have been a factor in his
surprisingly swift election as pope, and in this regard he has not disappointed.
One of his first major administrative moves was to downgrade the Vatican's
office for interfaith dialogue and ship its longtime chief, an archbishop who
was considered Rome's leading authority on Islam, off to a diplomatic posting.

Joseph Ratzinger was never one to sugarcoat his opinions, no matter whom they
offended. But while he was labeled with fearsome epithets like "Cardinal No" and
"God's Rottweiler," his reputation was a result not of loud and bully
pronouncements but rather his clinical-sounding diagnoses of what he saw as the
inherent faults of others.

To him, Buddhism was "an auto-erotic spirituality," non-Christian religions
were "gravely deficient," and Protestant churches were not churches at all but
"ecclesial communities." And there are his views of homosexuals ("objectively
disordered") and rock 'n' roll ("a vehicle of anti-religion").

To those who objected to his verdicts, the cardinal simply responded that the
truth is never comfortable.

But the principal factor behind the latest, and perhaps most serious,
contretemps is not so much his attitude toward Islam as his inherent resistance
to anything that could be considered an inward-looking critique of the Catholic
Church.

This is also one of the sharpest contrasts between Benedict and his
predecessor. From the start of his pontificate, John Paul developed what might
be called a "theology of apology" intended to shine a light on the "dark pages"
of the church's history.

He apologized for the condemnation of Galileo, for the "errors and excesses"
of the Inquisition, and for Catholicism's role in the wars of religion that
scarred Christendom. He issued mea culpas to Muslims and Jews for sins committed
against them by Catholics. By the time he died, he had made more than 100 formal
apologies.

For many church leaders, this campaign of penance was simply too much. Chief
among the critics, albeit usually sotto voce, was Cardinal Ratzinger, who once
publicly criticized "a kind of masochism" in the church "and a somewhat perverse
need to declare itself guilty for all the catastrophes of past history."

To Cardinal Ratzinger the great danger is that such criticisms, while perhaps
engendering goodwill with others, could foster the risky perception that since
the Catholic Church had erred in the past it could be wrong today – and, just as
perilously, could therefore be in need of change. Thus, his invocation of the
sins of another religion – in this case, Islam – is a natural extension of his
effort to tamp down calls for reform by presenting Catholicism as an immutable
exemplar of the religious ideal.

If Benedict did not possess such a blinkered view of history, he might have
easily spared himself and the church – especially Catholics who have suffered
directly for his scholarly presentation – great difficulty, while advancing
rather than impeding dialogue with Islam.

Ironically, his lecture in Germany focused on the indispensability of both
faith and reason to a complete religious vision, and the genius of Christianity
in incorporating Hellenistic philosophy. Rather than citing a 14th-century
dialogue that cast Islam in a poor light, Benedict could have gone back another
century or two, to the Iberian Peninsula, where Christian conquerors of Islamic
cities rediscovered the great works of Aristotle.

That Aristotelian corpus had been considered "lost" by the Christian world.
Its preservation thanks to Muslim scholars prompted a renaissance in Christian
thought and Western civilization, led by Saint Thomas Aquinas, in which reason
was deployed in the search for religious truth.

It was Aquinas, in fact, who coined the maxim that "grace does not destroy
nature." In other words, Christian faith builds on a person's innate character.

Pope Benedict is no devotee of Aquinas; he prefers the more pessimistic views
of human nature enunciated by Saint Augustine almost a millennium earlier.

Yet nothing might better prove the reasonableness of that Thomist dictum than
the events of the past week.

David Gibson is the author of The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His
Battle With the Modern World, published last month by HarperSanFrancisco. He
wrote this article for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.